Stormers director of rugby John Dobson has identified where it all went wrong for his charges in their United Rugby Championship (URC) derby loss against the Sharks in Durban on Saturday.
After an excellent start to their 2025/26 URC campaign, where they won their first eight matches, things have gone pear-shaped for the men from the Cape in recent weeks as they suffered back-to-back defeats to the Sharks on successive weekends.
The Sharks clinched an impressive 30-19 victory over the Stormers in Cape Town on January 24 and backed up that performance by sealing a 36-24 triumph in the rematch on Saturday.
Dropping down the table
Those two losses mean the Stormers have dropped down to third position in the URC standings, sitting on 36 points from 10 matches played.
Meanwhile, table-toppers Glasgow Warriors are eight points ahead of them and the Stormers are four adrift of second-placed Leinster although the Cape Town-based outfit have played one match fewer than those two clubs.
A disappointed Dobson said the Sharks were deserved winners and highlighted which areas proved costly for the Stormers in Durban.
“Credit must go to the Sharks; they beat us properly over both weeks,” he said. “Our discipline was poor, and our set-piece definitely let us down. I thought their aerial game was really good, and they played with a very clear plan that worked for them.
“The most destroying part (tonight) is that the same things that went wrong last week, went wrong this week.
“Failure to convert five-metre line-outs, giving penalties away at mauls, which led to some of the discipline stuff. So, for us to fix that stuff, there must be a change in behaviour.
‘I feel bad for our supporters’
“The Sharks’ plan worked again, and we couldn’t respond. It was really poor from us, and I feel bad for our supporters.”
After being outplayed in most departments in their first clash against the Sharks in Cape Town, the Stormers delivered a much-improved performance in Durban and held a slender 17-14 lead at half-time.
A brilliant converted try from Paul de Villiers early in the second half then gave the visitors a 10-point lead but they failed to kick on, with a plethora of unforced errors and poor discipline helping the Sharks to finish stronger as they went on to score 19 unanswered points which secured them their first-ever home and away victories over the Stormers in the URC.
Dobson bemoaned the fact that his troops did not rectify all their mistakes from their previous encounter against the Sharks, although he feels they showed some improvement.
“Playing them back-to-back was nice in the sense that we saw what went wrong last week, and we thought we could fix that. Other than our two starts to the halves, it felt very similar to last week. But I think we were marginally better (in Durban),” he said.
“We didn’t win the contestable (kick) game as much as we wanted to.
“If you are on 11 penalties after 20 minutes, that will include a card. And if you play for 20 minutes with just seven forwards and Damian Willemse must pack down on flank, it won’t be good enough.
“To me, it was our discipline and the lack of conversion (of chances) and stopping them from five metres out. It was a problem last week as well.”
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